The evolution of online shopping from an ad-hoc glorified bulletin board to the centre of retail itself with a dedicated ecommerce fulfilment system was far more gradual, far slower and involved the United Kingdom far more than many retellings will attest.

Whilst the first secure online purchase took place on 11th August 1994, laying the groundwork for ecommerce as we know it to begin and eventually leading to the sequential dominance of online retail throughout every market sector, online shopping existed for at least a decade before this.

Before a mysterious buyer spent $12.48 to walk in fields of gold, the combined power of teletext, an early British IT pioneer in an age before even the Sinclair Spectrum and a 72-year-old from Gateshead laid the groundwork for online shopping before the internet had even truly left American universities.

From Classifieds To Customers

Technically, the first ever transaction orchestrated online was between students at Stanford’s AI Laboratory and MIT in either 1971 or 1972, involving a substance that has since become completely legal for both medicinal and recreational use in both states since 2021, but at the time was illegal.

This has been credited, most notably by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, with creating the rise and establishing the need for online shopping.

However, given that the sale, if it happened, was so undocumented (likely because it was illegal) that we do not even know when it happened, it highlights little other than the potential for computer networks to act as classified adverts.

A much firmer foundation for the first online shopping system came from an enterprising early IT engineer named Michael Aldrich, during his 20-year career working for telecommunications conglomerate Rediffusion.

He joined the company in 1977 and stayed for so long that he oversaw the company changing names repeatedly, but it was in 1979 when he developed the first online shopping system ever.

The Route To Mrs Snowball’s House

Mr Aldrich used a system known as videotex, which is the underlying technology behind teletext services such as Ceefax, Prestel and Oracle.

Whilst it ultimately only saw limited use in the UK outside of subtitles, football scores, Bamboozle and Digitiser, the potential was there to use videotext technology to create a transformative two-way information terminal technology.

Mr Aldrich found that a television with a Prestel chipset built in could become a relatively easy-to-use, low-cost online shopping system.

It became popular within businesses; Thompson Holidays, Peugeot-Talbot (then just Talbot) and Ford were early adopters, but by far the most interesting of these was when Tesco tried the system out in Gateshead.

The first person to use the teleshopping system was Mrs Jane Snowball, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, who used it for all of her shopping with the help of Gateshead SIS (School IT Services), with the shopping delivered to her door.

In an interview for ITN, what is remarkable is that, outside of the dated teletext presentation, the system remarkably resembles an online supermarket today.

It highlighted the benefits of price, convenience and ease of use, all vital tools that ecommerce shops need to make the most of if they want to succeed in the far more competitive market today.